In an Education Leadership article, "Clicking Across Cultures", Sandy Cutshall clearly states the need for people to be multi-lingual in this century of global interconnectedness. Several schools are meeting that need without hiring more foreign language teachers. Students are communicating about a variety of issues via Skype, wiki pages, and blogs. For example students in Oklahoma and in France were studying WWI and WWII. They developed wiki pages to learn about the soldiers from OK that had served on French soil. Pictures were added of the soldiers graves in France, and students in Oklahoma developed background on the soldiers' roots in America. These students, using new tools, were learning the languages based on a need to communicate -- one of the best reasons for learning a new language.
21st Century Schools will be laced with a project-based curriculum for life aimed at engaging students in addressing real world problems & issues important to humanity. It seems that today a key word in 21st Century Learning is Engagement. There must be a constant balance that assesses student ability and aligns it with curricular expectation and challenges. When students are not provided proper guidance and facilitation by the teacher, the challenges of mastering content and skills may lead to a frustration level. If content is too easy, redundant, and provides no challenge; students may become apathetic to learning. It is the teachers duty to attempt to facilitate learning through such methods as PBL, differentiation, appropriate integration of technology, and relevant content application. In doing so, students should spend most of their learning hours in the engagement zone!
Financial, Economic, Business, and Entrepreneurial Literacy
Civic Literacy
21st classrooms provide an excellent opportunity to defeat apathy in civic responsibility. With the Center for Civic Education providing teachers an opportunity to promote and address citizenship based upon democratic values, teachers' abilities to create projects that foster students' involvement--promoting and fulfilling their roles as good citizens--is limited only by the instructor's creativity. Learning citizenship values relates directly to a student's life due to 21st century classroom structure and guidelines, and provides opportunities for students to exercise civic literacy not seen since, the VietNam, WWII, WWI, U.S. Civil War, the War of 1812, and the American Revolution eras.
Health Literacy
In order to address bullying in school, a middle school in California has implemented a program which places emphasis in building a positive and safe environment for the students. Some of the activities discussed were "No name calling" week, a school-wide prevention program called "Second Step" and on-line training for staff on
topics such as bulling, child abuse, and sexual; harrassment.
21st Century Themes Knowledgebase
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Global Awareness
In an Education Leadership article, "Clicking Across Cultures", Sandy Cutshall clearly states the need for people to be multi-lingual in this century of global interconnectedness. Several schools are meeting that need without hiring more foreign language teachers. Students are communicating about a variety of issues via Skype, wiki pages, and blogs. For example students in Oklahoma and in France were studying WWI and WWII. They developed wiki pages to learn about the soldiers from OK that had served on French soil. Pictures were added of the soldiers graves in France, and students in Oklahoma developed background on the soldiers' roots in America. These students, using new tools, were learning the languages based on a need to communicate -- one of the best reasons for learning a new language.21st Century Schools will be laced with a project-based curriculum for life aimed at engaging students in addressing real world problems & issues important to humanity.
It seems that today a key word in 21st Century Learning is Engagement. There must be a constant balance that assesses student ability and aligns it with curricular expectation and challenges. When students are not provided proper guidance and facilitation by the teacher, the challenges of mastering content and skills may lead to a frustration level. If content is too easy, redundant, and provides no challenge; students may become apathetic to learning. It is the teachers duty to attempt to facilitate learning through such methods as PBL, differentiation, appropriate integration of technology, and relevant content application. In doing so, students should spend most of their learning hours in the engagement zone!
Financial, Economic, Business, and Entrepreneurial Literacy
Civic Literacy
21st classrooms provide an excellent opportunity to defeat apathy in civic responsibility. With the Center for Civic Education providing teachers an opportunity to promote and address citizenship based upon democratic values, teachers' abilities to create projects that foster students' involvement--promoting and fulfilling their roles as good citizens--is limited only by the instructor's creativity. Learning citizenship values relates directly to a student's life due to 21st century classroom structure and guidelines, and provides opportunities for students to exercise civic literacy not seen since, the VietNam, WWII, WWI, U.S. Civil War, the War of 1812, and the American Revolution eras.
Health Literacy
In order to address bullying in school, a middle school in California has implemented a program which places emphasis in building a positive and safe environment for the students. Some of the activities discussed were "No name calling" week, a school-wide prevention program called "Second Step" and on-line training for staff on
topics such as bulling, child abuse, and sexual; harrassment.
Environmental Literacy